About this item

The 700-year history of the novel in English defies straightforward telling. Geographically and culturally boundless, with contributions from Great Britain, Ireland, America, Canada, Australia, India, the Caribbean, and Southern Africa; influenced by great novelists working in other languages; and encompassing a range of genres, the story of the novel in English unfolds like a richly varied landscape that invites exploration rather than a linear journey. In The Novel: A Biography, Michael Schmidt does full justice to its complexity. Like his hero Ford Madox Ford in The March of Literature, Schmidt chooses as his traveling companions not critics or theorists but "artist practitioners," men and women who feel "hot love" for the books they admire, and fulminate against those they dislike.



About the Author

Michael Schmidt

He recently completed The Novel: A Biography, to be published in May 2014, a companion volume to Lives of the Poets (1999) which was shortlisted for the American Book Critics' Circle Award. His most recent anthologies include, The Great Modern Poets, published by Quercus on National Poetry Day 2006; Five American Poets (including Robert Hass, James McMichael, John Matthias, John Peck, and Robert Pinsky) , published by Carcanet in 2010, and New Poetries V, including 22 hitherto uncollected anglophone poets from around the world, in 2011. His collection of poems The Resurrection of the Body was published in 2007. His Collected Poems appeared in 2009 and The Stories of My Life in 2013.



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